Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (20 page)

Now I am going back to Valledupar, and I don’t know what to do.

DIONISIO HAD GIVEN
one hundred pesos to the stationmaster to telephone him when the train was coming in, and because there had been no floods, no avalanches, no accidents, and no one had stolen any rails to build bridges with, the train was only seven hours late.

He flung himself into her arms as she stepped out of the carriage, but she only managed to smile wanly and stiffen in his embrace. His heart sank, because he knew that there was something wrong, but thought that it was a recurrence of her physical shyness. He began to feel the familiar niggle of resentment.

The General and Mama Julia had returned from holiday bearing gifts, and La Prima Primavera had decided to stay on so that she could regale them with guacamole sauce. The General rumbled about this, saying that he had always known that it was a mistake on Mama Julia’s part to plant so many avocados in the grounds, and he began to find excuses to eat in the officers’ mess at the barracks.

Anica, embroiled in her own tragedy and unable to share it, became pale and withdrawn. She was so tense that she could not make love any more, and she told Dionisio that she could not do it with his parents in the house in case they were overheard. He pointed out that they had done it every night before his parents had gone on holiday. He felt that he ought to respect her feelings, but he also thought that he knew that there was nothing to worry about. He thought that she was being wilful and obstinate, he felt irritated, and he felt insulted that she would not believe what he said. He wondered whether she might not be having one of her periodic relapses into virginity. He became moody and detached, like a dog that someone has forgotten to feed. He expressed his irritation by ignoring her, hiding his head in the pages of
La Prensa
, and by becoming sarcastic. He could not resist the powerful impression that he was being stalled for something other than her stated reasons, and so it was that he began to treat her badly at the very time when she needed his love the most and was being consumed with desperation. She fell into a misery so profound that lines appeared around her eyes, her hands began to shake, and she hovered always on the edge of tears. She felt his distance almost as bitterly as if he was keeping it in the full knowledge of what had happened to her in Ipasueno.

The Aerocondor plane was a relic of the Second World War and was too tired to fly above the mountains. Instead it flew between them and caught every buffet of the winds. The air hostess in her smart red dress with matching hat and lipstick was thrown about unmercifully as she stoically went up and down the aisle apportioning orange juice in foam-plastic cups, before tottering away again on her patent high-heeled shoes. Dionisio proved to Anica that if you left the juice in the cup for long enough, the plastic would start to dissolve. He thought that she would be delighted by it, but she was thinking about losing him, and she offended him by her indifference. She sat with her chin in her hands wondering how it was that even in a Dakota flying amid the sierra she felt harried by the machinations of evil men.

It was depressing to go in the coach through the backstreets of Bastanquilla. Everything seemed to reflect her state of mind. It was all dereliction, there was not a spot of new paint anywhere; the decay had gone far beyond the merely picturesque. He looked at her and suddenly felt as though he had come here with a stranger. Her solitary tears had puffed her face, she had withdrawn all her affection and was obviously acting out an imitation of her own habitual jollity. The cord of light that had invisibly connected them seemed to have been broken, and he settled into a prescient depression that was fully congruous to hers. He shot darts of black hatred at the buzzards and vultures atop the houses, because he was reminded everywhere of death.

Hours later, having lost litres in perspiration, having been squashed and battered by people carrying sacks of coconuts and sucking pigs, having got stuck behind God-knows-how-many-campesinos driving ceibu cattle across the road, having caught glimpses many times of the serene Caribbean, having looked at all the palms with their messianic fronds waving like semaphore, they arrived in Nueva Sevilla.

They found easily a room in a little pension off the Calle Santa Marta, right out on the edge of town. It was cool and dark even though there was no fan and little ventilation. They established that there were bedbugs in the beds and cockroaches in the shared kitchen, and that the excusado was blocked and fetid. Dionisio went out and came back with chemical powders and a rubber plunger, while Anica threw open the balcony shutters and moved the two truckle beds together so that there was a greater chance of leaving Dionisio with his child in her womb. As she unpacked their belongings and listened to the sea she started to feel some of her misery fade away, and she resolved that for this holiday, right up to the last day, they would be once again old friends and new lovers. When Dionisio had returned she put her arms around his neck and said, ‘Querido, let us go down to the sea.’

They put on their swimming things under their clothes and went down to the sea. The shore was covered in Coca-Cola and Pepsi cans, empty Marlboro and Kent packets, and all the eternally indestructible plastic flotsam of United States economic expansion. Dionisio held up a Coca-Cola can and said, ‘It would not be so bad if they still called it Inca-Cola.’

‘Is it safe to swim here?’ asked Anica. ‘Where do they discharge the sewage?’

‘I think it all goes along the coast the other way. But they say that the sharks eat one person a year, especially people in yellow swimsuits. Fortunately yours is green and mine is blue.’

‘Have they eaten this year’s victim yet?’

‘Apparently.’

‘O bueno.’

It was a deliciously hot and cloudless day that was only bearable in the water; Anica felt sure that at last she would become tanned enough to match the rest of the nation’s inhabitants. She went in and out of the water, sunbathing until she got too hot, and then returning to the sea. He watched her swimming breaststroke in small jerky circles and felt his love for her flood back into his solar plexus. She said, ‘You are not permitted to horse about, because I do not want to lose my contact lenses. If I lose them I will kick out your teeth.’

A few metres out they stood enclosed in each other’s embrace, kissing saltily as the water lapped about their chins. She put her hand down to feel him growing hard, and he slipped his down to feel her growing wet and turgid. She looked at him with her eyes shining and said, ‘You are an evil old bastardo.’

Back in the pension Anica said, ‘I have a nice surprise for you. You do not have to use rubbers anymore. I have gone on the pill.’

Dionisio was astounded. Such chemical technology was almost unavailable, and he knew no one who used it. ‘This is a joke?’ he asked.

‘No querido, I got them from my father’s doctor. He gets them from West Germany for his wealthy clients.’

He remembered something he had read in a magazine. ‘But you have to take it for a month before it is effective.’

‘I know. I have been taking it for a month,’ she lied, avoiding his infallible intuitive lie-detection by pretending to arrange the pillows.

They fell hungrily into each other’s embrace and made love on her side of the bed. They had fallen out of practice and out of rhythm, and he came too soon on account of the unfamiliar exquisiteness of contact with real flesh. But all the same, as if by sorcery, they found that they were lovers again, laughing and kissing in the darkness, uttering idiotic endearments, lying entwined with the sensation of homecoming.

LAZARO PASSED IN
his canoe through a shanty town where the destitute migrant workers, the dispossessed, the greedy opportunists, and the romantic optimists were mining for gold. In this tropical inferno there were no trees.

Lazaro missed the trees. He walked with his hideousness in a landscape made hideous by excavation and denudation. In the great pits men were working like termites, carrying their pails of mud up the sliding, glistening faces of these arbitrary holes in the earth. They were burrowing amid the heaps of spoil, slaving by the river, poisoning both it and themselves with the mercury of the separation process.

Downstream, the Indians were dying from eating fish poisoned with the metal, and the fish themselves were dying of it also. The once black waters had turned light brown, and the rains were washing the deforested banks into the riverbed. Nowadays the caboclos further downstream found that when the floods receded they were left not with virgin forest floor, but with an ocean of sucking clay that set hard and then cracked.

In the town at night the skeletal and rachitic workforce took their recreation amongst the corrugated iron and the middens. Indian girls with drooping breasts and malnourished stomachs, with dead eyes and the assurance of an early grave, gave away their favours to drunks in return for home-made rum and a few centavos. As they died of syphilis and influenza their little babies were abandoned by the river to what wild animals were left, and new girls arrived who had been rounded up by armed canoes or bribed with promises of beads and powerful husbands wearing cloaks made out of the pelts of pure black jaguars. After many rapes and beatings the girls would learn that they could suffer the present and forget the past with a bottle to their lips and a man with glassy eyes and a tubercular cough heaving between their thighs.

At night the place would reverberate with the gunshots of those who murdered in order to take the few flecks of gold gleaned by a bandeirante in his months of relentless toil. By day the buyers with their armed bodyguards would acquire the gold at rock-bottom prices, and those who refused such deals disappeared without mystery and were instantly forgotten, except perhaps by their trueloves at home, who waited for them to return rich, having known all along that they had in reality lost their loves forever.

The National Army, who had come in the first place to open up the area and build the ‘New Frontier’ in the name of the Fatherland and Economic Progress, watched in horror as the public disorder grew beyond their power to police it. Officers suffering from jiggers and maggots in their skin would observe helplessly as their men succumbed to unnameable fevers and fits of heat-induced dementia; they would send pathetic pleas for medical supplies and reinforcements, only to receive despatches encouraging them to ‘keep up the good work’. Some would send reports back that all was peaceful and that there was no further role for them, in the hope that their unit would be recalled. Many soldiers deserted and were lost to the forest, some joined the gold fever; most of them found a way to die.

Lazaro joined the army of beggars hoping to live off the crumbs that fell from the tables of illusory wealth. Don Ignacio the cura took pity on his ugliness and gave him a monk’s cowl that had been his own before he had left the monastery to take up this mission to the lost children of the slimepits and the auriferous mud. Don Ignacio lost his life to a knife in the back and a robber’s desire for his bone crucifix, but Lazaro was to wear the cowl for the rest of his life.

The nerves in his legs and arms began to harden, and he lost some of the control in them. They became as hard as wood. His septum collapsed, and in the darkness of his cowl his nose disappeared and his upper teeth loosened and were lost. Lazaro lost the ability to close his eyes properly, and in the shattering sunlight he sought out dark corners, where his begging became a litany of misery addressed to no one because it was in reality a reproach addressed to God.

In this town of misfortunes which would have astounded the imagination of Hieronymus Bosch, Lazaro took advantage of his disease and charged fifty centavos in the taverns to those who wished to stub out their cigarettes upon his extremities. They stubbed them out even in the necrotic and suppurating ulcers, because it made an amusing fizzing noise and the cigarette-end would absorb the pus and blood by capillary action. For five pesos Lazaro would then eat the cigarette-ends amid the howls of mirth and the shouts of encouragement. He would have smiled himself, but the progress of the disease into his cranial nerves had given him the palsy. For five pesos also, Lazaro would allow the bold frontiersmen to cut away the granular nodules that grew upon his hands and feet, and in this way he punished himself for his misfortune and would have earned a living from it too, did not his condition make it impossible for him to resist the attacks of nocturnal robbers and the gangs of mischief-makers.

One day, a month before the rains, Lazaro recollected his desire to die in the sierra, and at night he stole a canoe and paddled upstream to where the waters were black, and the fish unpoisoned. The last thing he heard from the town as he left it was the characteristic keening of an Indian woman.

ANICA WAS ATTEMPTING
to put the future aside and live in the present as she always had in the past. But impending disaster was breathing at her back and her moods swung between irrational optimism and disconsolate pessimism. She sometimes snapped at Dionisio, and she sometimes lost her sense of humour. He once pulled off her shorts in the sea, and she was furious with him when normally she would have laughed. She became annoyed when he stroked her thighs as they walked along, because it seemed to her to show a disrespect for her private grief, whereas before it used to send shivers up to her groin. He offended her by refusing to go into a dance-hall on the grounds that the music was so bad that it was a sacrilege against St Cecilia and Euterpe and Terpsichore, when she just wanted to go in and lose her unhappiness in dancing. She was offended by him when he got trouble with amoebas and had stomach cramps and diarrhoea. He felt as though he had swallowed a kilo of shards of glass, and spent hours moaning on the excusado; she felt that his misery was pathetic by comparison with her own, and she offered no sympathy, but left him there and went off to walk in solitude amongst the bazaars and the street-hawkers, cursing him for a weakling, only to return later full of repentant concern in order to wipe the fever from his face and ask him if he was all right.